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Ada and software engineering education: one professor's experiences

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

How do you select a programming language for your project? Few developers have the luxury of coding the same design in multiple languages to compare language merits. For over twenty years my undergraduate students have implemented the same large (10-15K lines), multi-tasking, real-time embedded system. In one 15 week semester, student teams specify, design, and implement software to control a substantial model railroad layout.
Students implement everything from device drivers for custom I/O hardware to high-level decision making algorithms. Student teams have implemented the project in both Ada and C. This paper describes the course, the laboratory, the project, and an analysis of the results achieved with each of the implementation languages.

References

[1]
A. Burns, and A. Wellings (2001), Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages (3rd Edition), Addison Wesley.
[2]
M. Amirijoo, A. Tešanović, and S. Nadjim-Tehrani (2004) Raising Motivation in Real-Time Laboratories: The Soccer Scenario, Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Norfolk, Virginia, USA, pp 265--269.
[3]
J. W. McCormick (1988), Using a Model Railroad to Teach Digital Process Control, SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol 20, pp 304--308.
[4]
J. W. McCormick (1991), A Laboratory for Teaching the Development of Real-Time Software Systems, SIGCSE Bulletin, vol 23, pp 260--264.
[5]
J. W. McCormick (2005), We've Been Working On The Railroad: A Laboratory For Real-Time Embedded Systems, Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, pp 530--534.
[6]
Dallee Electronics, Inc. Railroad Sound Systems. http://www.dallee.com/sound_systems.htm
[7]
M. Eisenstadt (1997), My Hairiest Bug War Stories, Communications of the ACM, vol 40, no 4, pp 30--37.
[8]
J. W. McCormick (1997), Forum Letter, Communications of the ACM, vol 40, no 8, p 30.
[9]
M. A. Rivas and M. G. Harbour (2001), MaRTE OS: An Ada Kernel for Real-Time Embedded Applications in G. Goos, J Hartmanis and J. van Leeuwen (eds) Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2001 in LNCS vol 2043, pp 305--316, Springer-Verlag.

Cited By

View all
  • (2015)Ada's Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital AgeundefinedOnline publication date: 22-Oct-2015
  • (2012)Teaching ‘concepts of programming languages' with adaProceedings of the 17th Ada-Europe international conference on Reliable Software Technologies10.1007/978-3-642-30598-6_5(60-74)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2012
  • (2010)The rise, fall and persistence of AdaACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/1879097.187908130:3(71-74)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2010
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Ada and software engineering education: one professor's experiences

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                          cover image ACM Conferences
                          SIGAda '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM annual international conference on SIGAda annual international conference
                          October 2008
                          150 pages
                          ISBN:9781605582740
                          DOI:10.1145/1454474
                          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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                          Publication History

                          Published: 26 October 2008

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                          Author Tags

                          1. ada
                          2. c
                          3. education
                          4. embedded
                          5. laboratory
                          6. model railroads
                          7. model trains
                          8. real-time

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                          SIGAda '08: ACM SIGAda Annual International Conference
                          October 26 - 30, 2008
                          OR, Portland, USA

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                          Cited By

                          View all
                          • (2015)Ada's Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital AgeundefinedOnline publication date: 22-Oct-2015
                          • (2012)Teaching ‘concepts of programming languages' with adaProceedings of the 17th Ada-Europe international conference on Reliable Software Technologies10.1007/978-3-642-30598-6_5(60-74)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2012
                          • (2010)The rise, fall and persistence of AdaACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/1879097.187908130:3(71-74)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2010
                          • (2010)The rise, fall and persistence of AdaProceedings of the ACM SIGAda annual international conference on SIGAda10.1145/1879063.1879081(71-74)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2010
                          • (2014)Wireless sensor/actuator network for model railroad controlProceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems10.1145/2668332.2668370(332-333)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2014
                          • (2009)Ada for the control of degradation of serviceACM SIGAda Ada Letters10.1145/1620593.162059629:2(20-27)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2009

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